Chapter 6

I continued with regular treasure-hunting trips to the moors. Apart from the usual flotsam and jetsam, I found several more relatively commonplace Roman coins. I used them as an excuse to visit Dr Wells a couple of times and ask whether he’d heard anything from the Italians, which was stupid because he would have called if he had any news. Dr Wells confirmed my latest finds were all relatively common, worth a few pounds at most.

On one occasion I also found a decent-looking but non-functioning analogue man’s watch. It didn’t seem waterlogged and it didn’t bear an inscription or anything that might identify its owner. When I showed it to my family, Dad guessed that all it might need was a clean and a new battery. None of my family wanted the watch and, despite being from a prestigious maker, a quick look on eBay showed that even in ‘as new’ condition, it wasn’t worth an awful lot so I gave it to Dex. Being brought up by his widowed mother, money in his household was tight and Dex often griped about the unreliability of his current timepiece. If nothing else he could use it as a prop for his magic tricks.

Once Dex had opened up the watch and replaced the battery, it worked as good as new. He was delighted. And, as a bonus, the wristband fitted his large wrists snugly. To maintain a balance, I let Phil choose a couple more Roman coins.

My treasure-hunting was interrupted by a period of really bad weather, the torrential rain causing flooding in some parts of the country. I didn’t make it to the moors again for a couple of months because, even after the rain stopped, Dad forbade me visiting the moors for a couple of weeks in the expectation they’d be very boggy. I still hadn’t told him that I had deliberately been targeting the boggy areas.

A fortnight of dry, sunny weather followed, causing Dad to relent. The following Sunday, I geared up and set off for the moors on my bike. As I found out when I got there, I should have left it longer. Even normally dry areas had rivulets flowing through them as the moors continued to shed excess water.

My morning searching was a complete bust. When I started feeling hungry, I looked around for somewhere dry to sit and eat my packed lunch. I spotted a dry hummock some distance away in an area I couldn’t remember visiting before, but then everywhere looked different after all the rain. When I made my way over to it, I found that the hummock was effectively a dry island, surrounded on all sides by flowing water, and I was able to stride over the water and land on solid ground.

After I’d demolished my sandwiches and can of drink, on impulse I decided to walk round the hummock, scanning the watery areas below with my metal detector in case something had been caught up in the current. To my surprise, about halfway around I encountered a weak signal. I knelt on the edge of the hummock and leaned over to excavate whatever had been detected. The object was buried deep in the dirt below the water and it took quite a lot of careful digging but, at the expense of soaking my sleeves, I finally managed to liberate it.

After I’d washed all the dirt off so I could inspect it properly, my first thought was that it looked like a metal version of the hated alice-bands Mum made Janey wear when younger to keep her hair in check, leading to Janey’s ongoing preference for short hair. The outside was plain metal but the inside was more ornate, covered in what might have been undecipherable writing or runes, but which also looked strangely like electrical circuitry.

I thought it would be quite funny to wear it on my head when I got home and see if anyone noticed. Would it fit? After taking off my headphones I put the band on my head and it actually fit quite well. I adjusted its position until it was positioned as though to keep my hair in check. Suddenly the device seemed to clamp itself to my skull and I felt a strange tingle at the back of my head. Panicking, I tried to prise the device free but it was so indelibly stuck it seemed almost to have become part of me. Suddenly words planted themselves into my mind: ‘Compatibility eighty four percent. Starting installation’.